Saturday, 2 November 2013

A lecture on the lecture

I
bet you any money that, 300,000 years ago on the plains of the African savanna,
one of our ancestors turned to another one and said: ‘You know what, it’s just
not been the same since we discovered fire. I wish we could go back to the good
old days of eating raw meat and being freezing all the time.’

You
see, nostalgia is an omnivorous and universal human urge. The belief that
things are not as good as they used to be seems to be hard-wired into our
brains. Not mine, though. I like progress: email, texting, Powerpoint, all that
stuff. It only bothers me when people think these things can somehow substitute
for human contact and connection.

The
Institute for Public Policy Research’s recent report on the future of
universities, An Avalanche is Coming, argued that ‘when lectures can now so
easily and cheaply be recorded and downloaded, the value of the live
performance becomes more questionable still. Students recognise this and the
result is the proliferation of viral videos that challenge the status of the
lecture.’ This is a view increasingly held within universities, with moves
towards podcasting and video ‘capture’ of lectures. Nowadays lecture theatres
are so arranged that the lecture console is at the side and it won’t get in the
way of the data projector. The Powerpoint presentation is thus supposed to be
the main attraction and the lecturer is like the Wizard of Oz, hidden behind a
desk working all the levers and buttons. Perhaps in the future we will be
replaced by those audioanimatronic figures they have at Disney World.

It’s
odd, because my experience is that students actually quite like having a
living, breathing, talking human being in front of them. And beyond
universities, the rise of literary festivals and the global TED movement
suggests that people will still turn up and pay to hear someone speak. Why on
earth would they do this when they could just download the ‘content’ – one of
the abstract nouns of our times - on to their tablets? Perhaps because we are
social animals, and not just rational-choice consumers?

The
best lectures are are not simply reducible to downloadable digital ‘content’,
because they are always partly improvised and thus exist only in the moment -
although few would go as far as Wittgenstein, who did no preparation at all and
said ‘that once he had tried to lecture from notes but was disgusted with the
result; the thoughts that came out were “stale,” or, as he put it to another
friend, the words looked like “corpses” when he began to read them.’ (David Leavitt,
The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer, p.
146)

The
best lectures are also full of what the Elizabethans called ‘lively turning’ –
strange juxtapositions, leaps of thought, rhetorical tricks, jokes and the
element of surprise. Of course, this is inseparable from risk. You might be
ensorcelled by the lecturer’s weaving together of words – or you might be a bit
bored. The touching thing is how polite audiences are in lectures, even if they
are uninterested. ‘Never, at a literary event,’ Clive James once wrote, ‘have I
ever seen even one person rise from the audience and say, “This is too boring
to bear.’” Audience members very rarely walk out, and they even try to refrain
from openly yawning, or looking at their watches too brazenly. It’s quite
sweet, really, this collective agreement to sit still and behave as if all this
really matters.

I
suspect some of us will carry on lecturing to an empty room, even when we have
been told that our lame jokes and bullet points are being downloaded directly from
our brains on to mobile devices. Margaret Drabble once gave a lecture in which
she told a sad story about Angus Wilson who, when old and in poor health, would
sometimes rise from his bed at night with a start and hurriedly collect a pile
of papers, saying he had to ‘go to give a lecture’. His partner Tony Garrett
would eventually reassure him that there was no lecture to be given, and he
would be persuaded to go back to sleep.

About Me

I am a writer and academic, based at Liverpool John Moores University. I have written five books, the most recent of which are Queuing for Beginners (2007), a cultural history of daily habits since the war, inspired in part by the Mass-Observation surveys of the 1930s and 1940s, and On Roads: A Hidden History (2009). As well as publishing articles in obscure academic journals, I write for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Financial Times and other publications. I am a cultural historian focusing on the very recent past, with a particular interest in the everyday. To email me, click on 'view my complete profile' below. You can follow me on Twitter at
twitter.com/joemoransblog